The ethereal-looking structure called SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short, is more than 150,000 light-years away from Earth. It resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy that orbits our Milky Way and, like it, belongs to the Local Group, our original cluster of galaxies.
The crimson glowing nebula is the remnant of a star that exploded in a violent supernova some 600 years ago – it’s the corpse of a white dwarf, a compact, low-mass star in its final phase. The astronomers suspect it was a Type Ia supernova; they are the only supernovae in which the parent star explodes completely without leaving a neutron star or black hole in the center.
Supernovae of this type occur in close binary systems in which one star is a white dwarf and the other a red giant (or a second white dwarf). The white dwarf extracts matter from its companion and gains so much mass that it exceeds the so-called Chandrasekhar limit (about 1.4 solar masses). Then gravity overwhelms the degeneracy pressure of the particles, causing the star to collapse and explode.
The composite image of SNR 0519 consists of X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The astronomers combined data from Chandra and Hubble with data from NASA’s decommissioned Spitzer Space Telescope to determine when the star in SNR 0519 exploded. With this data, scientists can “rewind” the movie of stellar evolution that has been playing since then and discover when it began.
The astronomers compared Hubble images from 2010, 2011 and 2020 to measure the speed at which the shock wave from the explosion blasted the material into space. Estimates varied between 6 and 9 million kilometers per hour. At the top end of this estimate, the blast happened about 670 years ago, when Europe’s plague epidemic – the Black Death – was at its peak, while China was in the middle of the Ming dynasty. .
However, since the speed of the material has likely decreased since the explosion, it may have occurred slightly earlier. In any case, the data from Chandra and Spitzer indicate that in the X-ray spectrum, the brightest regions of the remains are where the material shows the slowest velocity. However, no X-ray emissions can be measured from the fastest moving regions. This is likely because part of the blast wave encountered dense gas around the remnant, slowing it down.
Further observations with Hubble could allow astronomers to pinpoint the timing of the explosion even more precisely. (i.e)
Source: Blick
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